The Literal Stink of the Trump Apocalypse

Among the Apocalypse scent’s twenty or so elements are “a rod of iron,” “the smoke of the earth,” and “a grievous sore.”

Photograph Courtesy the artists and Carroll / Fletcher

Success By Trump is an eau de toilette that “captures the spirit of the driven man.” On the Trump Organization’s Web site, where the founder’s bio does not yet make mention of his new job, the scent is described as “an inspiring blend of fresh juniper and iced red currant, brushed with hints of coriander.” On Walmart.com, a 3.4-ounce bottle costs $29.60. “I would say it has a good scent,” Trump said when he was asked, on the occasion of the perfume’s launch, in 2012, what success smelled like. Then he was asked which scents he didn’t like: “Well, there are things you don’t want to mention,” he said. “Sometimes I smell things on people that are just terrible—things that make you not like them.”

Last Friday, the day that Trump became President of the United States, I marked his ascension by wearing a perfume that seemed, to me, more fitting than Success. Apocalypse, an olfactory index of every element in the Book of Revelation that could conceivably have a smell, was loaned to me by the London gallery of the conceptual artists Thomson & Craighead, who produced fifty bottles last year with the help of the Edinburgh perfumer Euan McCall. Among the twenty or so elements, which are conjured with a mixture of nearly a hundred synthetic compounds and natural oils, were “a rod of iron,” “the smoke of the earth,” “a grievous sore,” “flesh burned with fire,” “the wine of her fornication,” and “a lake which burneth with fire and brimstone.”

Since last October, when Hillary Clinton declared that “I’m the last thing standing between you and the apocalypse,” the end-timers have been out in force. Nostradamus is said to have predicted Trump’s rise with talk of “the false trumpet concealing madness”; Bible-prophecy experts like Erika Grey, the author of such books as “The Antichrist of Revelation: 666,” are waxing eschatological on Christian talk radio; and the “Broad City” girls are panicked that “it is about to get ‘I Am Legend’ up in here.” Whether we welcome the Second Coming or not, there’s a reason for our obsession with apocalypse in times of terror: the quick singe is always preferable to the slow burn.

On Saturday, still bug-eyed from Trump’s talk of “American carnage,” I opened the black Apocalypse box, emblazoned with a Gothic-looking “A.” The bottle was entombed in black velvet. Through the clear glass, the liquid looked both precious and vile—like Bordeaux, but murkier. I sprayed my wrist, inhaled deeply, and, I kid you not, got a nosebleed. After I recovered, I resumed sniffing, gingerly, and got the general impression of sweetness gone rogue. It was as though a cinnamon cookie had been sautéed in balsamic vinegar. The next night, at dinner, a friend pronounced the scent “not that bad.” She added, “It smells like you’re in line at the Abercrombie store, waiting to buy another bottle of the cologne you’re already wearing.”

What of the burning flesh? When I asked McCall, the perfumer, why I hadn’t smelled “every living soul died in the sea,” he told me that I had, in the jasmine oil: “A lot of the compounds you find in the smell of decaying flesh you also find in white flowers,” he explained. Costus, a type of thistle, provided the rooty, leathery notes—and also, McCall said, “the smell of unwashed hair.” And the grievous sore? McCall told me about civet, a musk material from the civet cat, which was part of the original formula for Chanel No. 5; it’s now produced synthetically. “It has a fecal smell in large quantities,” he said. “In small doses, it’s sweet.”

With time, the perfume seems to grow even sweeter—another thing it has in common with putrefying bodies, it turns out. Alison Craighead, one half of the artist duo, told me that commercial perfumers spend most of their money on the high notes, “which disappear quickly. We spent a lot of time in the lower notes, which last on your skin a lot longer. You should be able to smell it twelve hours later.” Jon Thomson, the other half, described his experience of wearing the perfume: “It starts hot, like incense; then it gets bloody, with iron notes and some leather.” The scent’s materials are apportioned according to a simple formula: the percentage of “blood” versus “flesh,” for instance, is determined by the number of times each is mentioned in the Book of Revelation. “We were trying to be as literal as possible,” McCall said.

The project was inspired by a visit to London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, where Craighead happened on a fourteenth-century altarpiece from Hamburg with forty-five colorfully gruesome scenes. “It’s laid out like a cartoon,” she said, “and I couldn’t quite believe some of the images—the walking dead, the Earth opening up, things shooting out of the sky.” When I asked Thomson if we were living through an apocalypse, he mentioned climate change, income inequality, and Brexit, in addition to our new American regime: “Perhaps this ‘post-truth’ climate harks back to a more medieval mind-set, when everyone in Europe believed that the end of the world was actually taking place around them.” On Friday, the Apocalypse scent will suffuse the room at Young Projects Gallery, in Los Angeles, for the opening of a new Thomson & Craighead show, spanning sound and video work. The title: “Wake Me Up When It’s All Over.”

By now, we know that the Trump apocalypse is happening step by step, rather than at once. That’s by design, as Steve Bannon told the Hollywood Reporter after the election: “Darkness is good. Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power. It only helps us when they”—liberals—“get it wrong. When they’re blind to who we are and what we’re doing.” When the White House floats two names for the Supreme Court vacancy—Neil M. Gorsuch, an originalist who is nonetheless erudite and circumspect, and William H. Pryor, Jr., who not so long ago argued that anti-sodomy laws were constitutional—there’s no reason for wishful thinking, for imagining that things are mellowing out when in fact they are rotting through. As Thomson told me of the Apocalypse scent, “The cloying sweetness is what sticks in my nostrils. That is where the bile and dread hide in plain sight.”